The thing with traditional desserts is, one has to wait to get an invite for a wedding or for an auspicious occasion to be able to relish them. Or, turn to YouTube to learn and do it yourself. The final product could make you a winner or will force you to dump everything in the bin.
There’s ray of hope though, for those craving these traditional sweets in businessman Imran ’s Meethe Miya. Meethe Miya (MM) is not one of those run of the mill sweet shops that sells everything from rasmalai to mysore pak. “Meethe Miya is a place to relish Hyderabadi desserts which we call meetha, and not mithai,” explains Imran Baig.
MM is a few months old and Imran who used to run City Cabs earlier says his instinctive feeling to shift business worked well.
The shift from cabs to food business is a huge one, so what was Imran thinking of? “After players like Radio cabs, Ola and Uber took over the way Hyderabadis commuted, there seemed no need to clog the city roads with more cars. Our cabs business worked well during its time, so it made sense for me to make an exit. Along with the cabs business, I am an event planner (of weddings) as well. The idea of MM is an off-shoot of my event planning business ‘Shadiwale’,” confesses Imran.
As an event planner, Imran witnessed large banquets and private parties and the quantities and variety of food made him come up with a traditional Hyderabadi touch to the desserts at such events. “Traditional meetha in Hyderabadi homes is no big deal. My mother, aunts, everyone made them, I grew up seeing them make for family get-togethers. That way I had no dearth of suggestions. I started work with a list of names in mind, and it turned out to be quite an exhaustive one,” says Imran.
Surprisingly, Imran himself isn’t a big fan of sweets. He says he relishes them in really tiny quantities. When he finally set out make MM a reality, he found it difficult finding a chef who would know the traditional meethas like Andey ka lauz, Sheer korma, ashrafi, badam ki jali, kheer puri, kaddu ka kheer and so on. “The search for a chef itself took me a few months,” recalls this entrepreneur.
Are cupcake-obsessed millennials even looking at Meethe Miya? “I can’t say much about the age group of the clientele because we do a lot of business through food delivery apps, and I am not complaining. However, the new branch at Film Nagar has a young crowd that looks for something beyond cupcakes and chocolate bombs. A lot of them also want to explore new flavours so they try traditional meetha and get hooked,” says Imran.